On Thu, 11 Oct 2007, Ralf Baechle wrote:
> That would be quite unexpected. Binutils has severe issues when used
> with multiple binary formats. For the general case fixing and maintaining
> that would be of almost nightmarish complexity so years ago I settled for
> elf2ecoff and I guess that step also made binutils maintainers alot
> happier ;-)
I have now recalled what the issue is -- `objcopy' is keen to copy the
file header as well as possible and that includes MIPS-III annotation
which makes the firmware of R4k-based DECstations unhappy. They all
expect MIPS-I binaries. It's not binutils's fault I am afraid.
> With ELF dumb more generic protocols like TFTP work great. Shows what
> a great format ELF is ;-)
Yeah, sure... Until you discover your ELF parser in the firmware does
not do this and that and also crashes on yet something else (since when
has CFE supported ELF64, then?). You cannot escape such bugs as one with
ECOFF above for example. And if your firmware is a binary blob in a
classic PROM, then you are bust.
At least an <address,size> pair is dumb enough it is hard to get it wrong
and `mopd' may be modified however you like to get what you need; the
daemon itself is not interested in the gory details of the binary being
sent, so it will accept about anything remotely conforming to the ELF
format anyway. :-)
Maciej